Share this story

Further Reading

The notorious website xDedic, where online criminals offered access to compromised computers and more, has been shuttered by numerous law enforcement agencies.

According to federal prosecutors in Tampa, Florida, the site "facilitated more than $68 million in fraud."

Law enforcement agencies in Germany, Belgium, and Ukraine seized the site's domain names and servers in Europe. No arrests or indictments were announced.

Back in 2016, Ars covered a new security-industry report on xDedic, noting that at the time it had catalogued 70,624 servers, many belonging to government agencies or corporations from 173 countries.

"From government networks to corporations, from Web servers to databases, xDedic provides a marketplace for buyers to find anything," Kaspersky researchers wrote in a separate blog post at the time. "And the best thing about it—it's cheap! Purchasing access to a server located in a European Union country government network can cost as little as $6."

Share this story

Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar